Online you can easily find a certain number of email extractors: that is, software or services that harvest generic email accounts from a given website or a given portion of the web – more or less like an email search engine.
This technique can be very tempting for marketing: in a minute you collect a great number of addresses, then you simply copy them in your favorite bulk email software and blast a newsletter. But you shouldn’t adopt it carelessly, because it will bring you only troubles. And that for three reasons:
- It’s wrong – and it can be illegal. The only true and valid email marketing is the opt-in email marketing: that’s a basic law, and it’s here to stay. Ramassing some email accounts and send them newsletters immediately without asking for permission is spam; and it can be illegal in many countries.
- It doesn’t make your business grow. It simply doesn’t work well: because you’re not proposing an offer to an interested or a prospect client – you’re bothering unknown people with a message that they did not ask for. Email marketing is a way to build a loyal relationship with your users, and not blasting messages around hoping that “a bigger database = more money”. That’s utterly wrong.
- It will kill your deliverability. Keeping sending unsolicited mass emails can easily ruin your IP reputation and make ISPs label you as a spammer. Even using a dedicated SMTP server won’t help – and in fact, here at turboSMTP we have a strict policy about the use of permission-based lists.
That said, there’s an alternative.
You can collect some unknown email addresses on the web with an email extractor and then send them just one sign-up request (you can also use our ready-made form). This is simply a proposal to join your newsletter list: if someone answers giving her permission, go for it – but avoid to bother again all the others.
Of course, make sure to use a professional SMTP server to ensure that all these emails correctly get to the inbox.